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Mai Chen will be publishing Public Law Toolbox with LexisNexis in 2012. Pre-order your copy of the Public Law Toolbox here.
A preview of reviewer comments on the book:
Rt Hon Sir Geoffrey Palmer, Distinguished Fellow Faculty of Law and the Centre for Public Law Victoria University of Wellington:
This book is unique. There is nothing else like it. It adds a new dimension to understanding the New Zealand government and how New Zealanders are governed. It is not a book that concentrates upon theory or gives detailed analytical accounts of legal doctrine. What it does is to look inside the engine of the New Zealand system of government and tell people how it works, up close and in detail. It is the perspective of an engineer in the engine room.
There is great value in the focus because it adds to the sense that New Zealanders govern themselves through their democratic institutions of which Parliament is the prime mover. In effect this book shares many secrets that have been learned in the course of the legal practice of public law. It is appropriate that it should. These insights should belong to the wider public in whose name the institutions of government perform. New Zealand has a low level civil culture and this book should help to rectify that. Too often New Zealanders do no knowledge how our open and democratic institutions work. This book lifts the veil on those mysteries.
The insights contained in this book also empower people to use the institutions of government, whether they are businesses, non-governmental organisations or just plain citizens. They can learn from it who to go to, where to go and how to make representations on issues of concern to them.
I am proud of my association with Mai Chen in starting Chen Palmer and I am pleased it continues to flourish. I left in 2005 to become President of the Law Commission. But Mai has continued and brought the firm to maturity. This book sets out for everyone lessons to be learned in how to deal with the big, breathing beast called the New Zealand Government. She is to be commended for having written it, so clearly forthrightly and with such insight.
Rt Hon Dame Jenny Shipley:
Mai Chen's Public Law toolbox is a gift to our nation of monumental proportion! It is a comprehensive, authoritative, culturally insightful and intensely interesting body of work which is highly accessible and relevant for any professional, business, student and the layperson operating in New Zealand today.
In its creation, Mai has generously and skilfully succeeded in demystifying the complexity of our public law, the body politic, the bureaucracy and the many institutions that surround them by stripping back the Big Data curtain and allowing us to step inside and become a player.
In doing so, she has revealed the complex set of roles and relationships that exist amongst the many actors and institutions thus evening up the playing field as never before.
This toolbox will empower the reader. It is a highly useable and informative roadmap of New Zealand’s legal and institutional architecture and function which should in future provide confidence to many, who up until now have felt excluded, as to how they should proceed forward in their thinking and actions as they seek to understand, benefit from, take on or share in the life of the New Zealand public system.
Professor Te Wharehuia Milroy CNZM, Fellow of the International Centre of Language Revitalisation, Te Ipukarea: The National Maori Language Institute at the Auckland University of Technology, Co-director of Te Panikiretanga o Te Reo, Te Wanaga o Aotearoa, Trustee of Te Kohanga Reo National Trust Board:
This book is unrivalled in its form and purpose. The New Zealand public can only benefit from its contents. Understanding the nature of the relationship between the courts and the government and its policies is central to the construction of social policy. The Public Law Toolbox is a book designed to remove the complexities of the processes of government and how that then is translated into law. One of the outstanding aspects of this publication is that it so communicative in its language. The reader will be impressed and thankful that author is so skilled in being inclusive in her style of writing allowing insights to the law and politics that have been restricted mainly to the specialists.
In an era where Maori have been utilising the Treaty of Waitangi Act and the Waitangi Tribunal to challenge government and its policies past and present, this book would have made the matter of seeking redress under the Treaty a more efficient and manageable process at a much earlier stage. The New Zealand public and Maori in general is deficient in knowledge of the public law and its applications. The Public Law Toolbox will become the means whereby the insights it provides will allow people to engage with government and its agencies with a much more informed approach.
This book is a must for Maori, if they are to understand with greater clarity how government works, and how they can engage with government in matters of policy and law or in providing a more constructive and effective way of dealing with issues that are of a public concern. The Public Law Toolbox will most certainly avail them of the knowledge and process to engage at agency or central government level in a more enlightened manner.
Mai Chen must be congratulated on providing a tool which I believe is going to serve well many organisations in dealing with the institutions of government. It is the road code and the G.P.S for the general public which will allow them to negotiate pathways to and from government where to go, who to see, when and how.
Joan Withers, Chair Auckland International Airport Ltd, Chair Mighty River Power Ltd, Deputy Chair TVNZ Ltd, Director The Treasury Advisory Board:
Mai Chen is uniquely qualified to write this book.
What she has produced is an accessible, easy to read guide that assists in the navigation of the operation of government which for many of us in business is at best a maze and at worst a minefield.
The book provides formidable evidence of the depth of Mai's knowledge and experience and the examples cited are relevant and topical. I believe it is not only a "must read" for businesspeople in New Zealand but it is also a "must keep" in that it is unmatched as an ongoing reference tool on the subject.
I realised as I read, that much of my knowledge on the topics covered had been gleaned from context rather than from an in-depth understanding of the rules, structures and protocols which govern the operation of the state and its agencies. Engagement with government is a necessary component of doing business in NZ, particularly in large organisations, and a better comprehension of how it works can only assist in facilitating greater alignment and better outcomes.
David McGee QC, Ombudsman and former Clerk of the House:
As well as giving a comprehensive description of the citizen’s interaction with public law, this book is particularly valuable as bringing to the subject the perspective of a public law practitioner. Thus it is informed by the needs of those relating to government and government agencies. In the last analysis, one may always need to resort to the courts, but there are a myriad of other potential means of solving public law problems short of this. Mai Chen explores and explains these, drawing on her own extensive experience from practice to do so. In this way she illustrates areas of government that are little-known except to specialists.
David Rutherford, Chief Human Rights Commissioner:
This toolbox will be of great use to government, NGO’s, business and those who advise them. Its greatest gift though is to people who confront power doing something that they think is not right. In such situations, people wonder: “Can they do this?” and soon find out that there is no equality of arms when it comes to people taking on power. Mai Chen’s toolbox significantly tools up the citizen and that can only be good for freedom and democracy in New Zealand.
Professor Susan Watson, former Head of the Commercial Law Department and director of the New Zealand Governance Centre, University of Auckland School of Business:
Only Mai Chen could have written this book. It is the distillation of a career spent in the successful practice of public law. Public Law Toolbox provides a user manual setting out how public law need not be a barrier but rather how the tools of public law can be used to grease the wheels of business and to release "the brown cardigan handbrake."(Chapter 6). It thus provides an accessible bridge between business people and the operation of public law. By demystifying and explaining public law, it achieves no less an outcome than demystifiying and explaining the feared and much maligned and misunderstood "system"
Janine Smith,Chair of AsureQuality and Cerno NZ Limited, Director of Warehouse Group and Steel and Tube Limited, Principal The Boardroom Practice Limited:
An appropriately named book and "must have" for directors and CEO’s to increase their understanding of the dynamics of Government. The book is diverse and all encompassing. An easy read, and a great reference tool as well, that establishes the history and framework of decision making, and offers a set of directions for all to traverse the Government maze.
Vivien Maidaborn, Former CEO CCS Disability Action, and Relationship Services NZ, NZ Community Development and Social Innovation Consultant and Executive Director Social Innovation Investment Group Trust NZ:
Reading The Public Toolbox after 30 years in community and public organisation leadership in NZ was an astonishing experience. Firstly it is an inclusive book, Mai Chen assumes the importance of community, government, business and individual society members as equally vital to the development of Public Law, and includes all these groups in her audience. It is a rare experience to find this high level view of the cross sector workings of society but it is even rarer to find a technical, legal voice that takes citizens as individuals and their self-organising community democracy as seriously as Chen does.
At a time in our country when community organisations are only accepted as registered charities if we do not advocate on issues, or criticise the government of the day there has never been a greater need for a sound and comprehensive resource on the whole range of tools to directly influence the development of public law.
In the community sector in NZ we have powerful dreams and aspirations for our country, and make significant local, national and international contribution to the NZ economy and to social wellbeing. The Public Law Toolbox re-asserts the sense of value in active community voices and engaged citizens. In a very practical sense The Public Law Toolbox deepens and broadens the strategies and tactics we might use in rebalancing the relationships between the community sector and the NZ government. Its greatest gift is that it strengthens our resolve and fortitude that active and engaged citizenship is integral to healthy democracy.
It is a book that re-energises and re-introduces us as New Zealanders to the power of citizenship and the importance of all of us being confident players in influencing our democracy and the law that guides it.
Dr Sarah Sandley, Publisher & CEO, APN Magazine Group, Chair, Auckland Writers and Readers Festival Charitable Trust, Former Trustee, SPARC (Sport NZ):
To all those not working in government, its bewildering complexity and speed switches - from torpid to rapid - are confusing. In the Public Law Toolbox, Mai Chen shares more than 25 years of legal experience advising clients on how to navigate the highways and byways of political and legislative power. The book takes a layperson’s perspective and explains in admirably clear, plain English the detailed why, who and when of government’s structure, roles and processes.
In doing so, it shines a light in to what appears to be a closed shop and equips all citizens, institutions and businesses with practical information on how government works, and with sure-fire approaches on how to hold government departments to account.
Public Law Toolbox empowers its readers by utterly demystifying “the system”. Invaluable.
Find out more about the Public Law Tool box here.